Celestial Empire

The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction

Nathaniel Isaacson

Publication Year: 2017

Challenging assumptions about science fiction’s Western origins, Nathaniel Isaacson traces the development of the genre in China, from the late Qing Dynasty through the New Culture Movement. Through careful examination of a wide range of visual and print media—including historical accounts of the institutionalization of science, pictorial representations of technological innovations, and a number of novels and short stories—Isaacson makes a case for understanding Chinese science fiction as a product of colonial modernity. By situating the genre’s emergence in the transnational traffic of ideas and material culture engendered by the presence of colonial powers in China’s economic and political centers, Celestial Empires explores the relationship between science fiction and Orientalist discourse. In doing so it offers an innovative approach to the study of both vernacular writing in twentieth-century China and science fiction in a global context.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

When I first began research for this project as a PhD student at UCLA,
I was under the impression that I would be able to cover the entire
twentieth century and that the paucity of available materials would
mean that the decisions about what to include and what to exclude had
already been made for me. As I neared completion of the dissertation,
my adviser confessed to me that when I had originally proposed the
project, he had thought it was not feasible at all. I am eternally grateful to him for having the patience and wisdom...

INTRODUCTION Colonial Modernity and Chinese Science Fiction

This interdisciplinary cultural study of early
twentieth-century Chinese popular science
writing and science fiction (hereafter SF)1
and its relationship to the colonial project
and industrial modernity traces the development of the genre in China from its early history in the late Qing dynasty through the decade after the New Culture
Movement (roughly 1904–1934). The emergence of Chinese
SF was a
product of the transnational traffic of ideas, cultural trends, and material culture that was engendered by the presence of colonial powers
in China’s economic and political...

1 GENRE TROUBLE: Defining Science Fiction

The following chapter presents a summary
of recent trends in the field of SF studies and
offers some initial observations on their germaneness to early Chinese SF. These observations are developed more thoroughly in
the close readings and historical accounts
that follow in chapters 2 through 6. I do not intend to force Chinese
SF at the turn of the twentieth century into a universalizing theoretical
framework, nor am I making an Orientalist argument positing the exceptionality of “SF with Chinese...

2 LU XUN, SCIENCE, FICTION: Science Fiction and the Canon

Lu Xun’s preface to
A Call to Arms
relates
his apoplexy upon viewing the image of a
Chinese man being executed in Japanese-occupied Manchuria and the apathetic
countenances of the surrounding crowd, and
how this moment in a lecture hall in Sendai
in 1905 led him to abandon the study of medicine and turn toward the
“spiritual cure” of literature. This moment is ripe material for scholars
of Chinese literature and film in search of a single traumatic rupture
to represent the inception of modern Chinese literature.1 His father’s
succumbing to tuberculosis had led Lu Xun...

3 WU JIANREN AND LATE QING SF: Jia Baoyu Goes to Shanghai

Wu Jianren’s 1905 “sequel” to the Chinese
classic
Story of the Stone
(Hong lou meng / Shitou ji),
The New Story of the Stone
(Xin
shitou ji) is missing one of the key identifying characteristics of SF—the genre label
itself on the story as it originally appeared;
instead it bore the imprimatur “social fiction” (shehui xiaoshuo).1 In
terms of the literary field,
New Stone
overlaps with a number of other
narrative modes. The author’s introduction acknowledges that it is
one sequel among many aimed at commercial profit. Stylistically, Wu
adopts the form of chapter fiction, but also incorporates...

4 SF FOR THE NATION: Tales of the Moon Colony and the Emergence of
Chinese Science Fiction

Published serially in the fiction monthly
Xiuxiang xiaoshuo
between 1904 and 1905,
Huangjiang Diaosou’s (b. ?)
Tales of the
Moon Colony
(Yueqiu zhimindi xiaoshuo) is
the first native Chinese work labeled as science fiction. Through a close reading of this
uncompleted novel, this chapter examines the anxieties associated with
utopianism, nationalism, and Occidentalism that revealed themselves
in early Chinese SF.1 While the text depicts a world in which Asian
scientists and explorers successfully vie with their European counterparts for hegemony over their common...

5 MAKING ROOM FOR SCIENCE: Mr. Braggadocio

“New Tales of Mr. Braggadocio” (“Xin Faluo
xiansheng tan”), Xu Nianci’s1
“sequel” to
Iwaya Sazanami’s2 “Hora Sensei,” was published in 1904 in
Forest of Fiction
(Xiaoshuo
lin) and features two different moments of
Fanonian double consciousness in its opening pages. A prefatory remark in the voice of the author’s pseudonym, Juewo (“The Awakened One”), refers to the work as little more
than “gossip heard through the bean trellis” (doupeng xianhua) and
a “ludicrous attempt at imitation” (Xu Nianci 2011, 1; “New Tales of
Mr. Braggadocio,” 15). This pseudonymous...

6 LAO SHE’S CITY OF CATS: A Social-Science Fiction?

Cat Country, the dystopian Martian travelogue of Lao She (1898–1966),1 was originally printed serially in the magazine
Xiandai
(Les Contemporains), between August
1932 and April 1933. The novel represents a
brief resuscitation of SF after two decades of
near total silence in the genre—the exception that proves the rule in a
rapidly shifting cultural field. By the time Lao She penned
Cat Country, vernacular writing had for the most part won out over classical
registers as the ideal vehicle for reform-oriented fiction. In chapter 7,
I attempt to demonstrate that the apparent absence...

7 WHITHER SF / WITHER SF: An Alternate History of Chinese SF

As the field of Chinese SF studies evolves, the
ebb and flow of SF in China continues to be a
central question. As early as 1905, essays on
the genre attempted to identify premodern
adventure and fantasy novels like
Journey to
the West
(Xiyou ji) and
Flowers in the Mirror
(Jing huayuan) as examples of early Chinese SF, and a number of contemporary studies (Takeda and Hayashi 2001; Zhang Zhi 2009; Wu
Xianya) make similar claims, including a number of works that might
best be described as fantasy in their taxonomy (Wu Yan 2011). Shortly
after appearing on the literary scene in the early...

Conclusion

Reflecting on the potential lessons that Chinese SF has to offer the expanding field of “global science fiction,” Veronica Hollinger has noted
the parallels between central themes of Lu Xun’s work and key themes
of a number of recent works of Chinese SF by Liu Cixin and Han Song
(Hollinger, forthcoming). In Liu Cixin’s short story “The Village School-teacher” (“Xiangcun jiaoshi,” 2001), the teacher at a benighted and impoverished rural school lies on his deathbed in the one- room schoolhouse where he teaches, suffering from...

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